Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to management of alarms in a telecommunications system, and more particularly to management of a flood of alarms in such systems.
Related Art
Telecommunications systems generally have a large number of elements which together create a network infrastructure, such as a cellular network infrastructure. Network elements may be physical elements such as antennas, base stations, servers and the like, or software elements, where instructions are executed on one or more processing units. Network elements (NEs) and Element managers (EMs) are typically monitored and generate alarms during such monitoring to a network management system (NMS).
Reports may include events or alarms which the NEs or EMs send to the NMS. A flood of events/alarms occurs when a large amount of events or alarms are generated by one or more NEs or EMs, exceeding the NMS's handling capacity. The NMS may be impacted in such a way as to cause a delay in processing in a certain area in the system, leading to system resources (e.g., memory, disk space) exhaustion and eventually to a system partial or full crash. Alternatively, such a flood can lead to loss of tracking of events and alarms. Most floods have an additional dimension, which may be repeated events or toggling events. Repeated event floods occur when the same event is repeated at a high rate, being reported by one or more elements of the system. Toggling event floods occur when alternating events (such as indicating a system is offline then indicating a system is online and vice versa) are repeated at a high rate and reported by one or more elements of the system.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a solution that overcomes the deficiencies of conventional solutions, by appropriate handling of flood situations that could prevent or at least reduce the risk of partial or full system crash.